Honourable Minister, I thank you, as well as the persons from your department who are here with you, for coming to meet with us today.
I would be very happy if at the beginning of next year, you could spend two hours with us, not to talk about estimates but to raise issues about the upcoming budget. I would have many questions to put to you and to your officials regarding the next budget. For now, I would like to put one question and then let my colleague Yvon Lévesque, who is involved with the far north and very concerned by the situation of the Cree and Inuit in Nunavik in Quebec, put one or two questions as well.
In the supplementary estimates, I do not see anything that would be meant for improving education among the first nations. Somewhere, I saw a $1.8 million transfer. In any case, education is going through a tremendous crisis, and I am talking only about the primary and secondary levels. I am not even mentioning the post-secondary level. There is a shortage of funds. I wonder why I do not see any supplementary funds requested for this. The sole objective consists in bringing aboriginal students up to a level comparable to that of white students. In many first nations primary and secondary schools, if not in all of them, there are no computers and there is no library. There is no vocational training at all.
Would there not be some way of transferring funds in order to improve first nations education?